Data Recovery

Hard disk drives can break and data can be lost in a variety of ways –

Drives can fail mechanically – a component inside the hard disk may break resulting in the data becoming inaccessible.

..or electrically – the controller board on the hard drive may blow – often due to incorrect power supply units being attached

..or their programming can become corrupted – this is commonly called ‘firmware’ and relates to the microprograms that make the hard drive function correctly.

..or the hard drive can develop unreadable areas known as bad sectors. Data in these bad areas will not be accessible

..or human error may be involved – typically a file or folder get deleted, or a system is re-installed before all the data is backed up.

In most cases, the data on your hard drive will be recoverable. However, it’s important to you go about the recovery process in the right way.

When You Don’t Need A Data Recovery Company

Whether you need to use a data recovery company of not depends upon what’s actually wrong with your hard drive. Often you don’t need a data recovery company if all you’ve done is delete some files or folders. In circumstances like these, when there’s nothing wrong with the drive, you don’t need a data recovery company. All you usually need is some software that will recover the deleted data for you.

When You Do Need A Data Recovery Company

You only really need a data recovery company when there’s something wrong with the hard disk. Mechanical faults, electrical faults, firmware faults, and drives with a lot of bad sectors require data recovery specialists. These are disk problems that can not be fixed by buying software. You need to use a data recovery company.

The above example shows a hard drive with a mechanical failure – the lid of the hard drive has been removed to give you a better understanding of what goes on inside the drive: the heads of the drive no longer work and drive is continually resetting as it’s failing a self test that all hard drives go through when they are first powered on. Does your hard drive sound like this? If it does it also has a mechanical fault and to recover it you need a data recovery company.

Why Don’t You Just Use A High Street Shop ?

Don’t even go there – no really. Unless you have deleted some files or folders do not use a high street shop. PC shops are good at selling you printer cartridges or a new monitor, they do not have the skills, the tools or the knowledge to recover data from faulty hard drives.